Collateral Damage
by Bloodshot Eyes
Summary: L's self-styled archenemy resurfaces and threatens L with more than the corpses of strangers and an impossible case; this time it's personal. Light discovers that Kira isn't nearly as god-like as he first imagined. M for gruesome violence.
1. Prologue

This story was supposed to be a break from my other story, but now it tends to overwhelm it. I brainstorm for it at my job, which I have plenty of hate for, while listening to Nightwish's song "Last of the Wilds". There needs to be more Celtic-flavored metal in this world.

**WARNINGS** – **SPOILERS** for _Another Note _and _Death Note _to Volume 7 and violence as graphic as I can write it.

* * *

Prologue

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The phone rings. The detective knows who it is, but a sense of dread keeps him from answering right away. What new horrors await him during this call?

"Hello?" His voice is without inflection, as always. He could win an Oscar for this performance.

"L," the voice hisses, a note of madness in it. "He's awake. Ask him how he's doing!" There is a brief dark chuckle.

The line is silent at first, then L becomes aware of breathing. Just breathing. The rhythm is off, though, as if the person is in great pain. He doesn't know what is going on, exactly, but from past experience, he can guess. He doesn't swallow, he doesn't grimace, he certainly doesn't cry.

But he wants to.

"Light?" he whispers. The breathing changes again, as though surprised. Finally, the sound he's been waiting to hear.

"Ryu-- za- ki?" Breath is sucked in shallowly.

"Light, are you-" The broken voice interrupts with a sob.

"Tell him to kill me. Tell him to kill me, please. _Please, _Ryuzaki..."

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	2. There will be Blood

There will be Blood

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_Six weeks ago..._

_-_

"Ryuga Hideki?"

The man being called 'Ryuga' turned around at the other's voice so near his own. He looked rather confused, and with good reason, for that wasn't his name. He had been wandering for several hours now, taking in the sights of Tokyo University's campus as well as the surrounding areas, walking with no real destination in mind as he thought, at least until this boy came up to him.

"Ryuga-san!" The other person approached him at a run slowing to a walk, followed not too distantly by the rest of his friends. The boy that now stood before him panted slightly and cleared his throat. "We haven't seen you in a while, but have you given any more thought to joining the tennis team?"

The man being addressed grew perplexed. Who was this boy and why did he think he knew who he was? "I'm sorry, I think you have me confused with someone else." His voice was rather deep and gravelly, his words delivered in a monotone. The boy looked shocked, as did his friends, and he even squinted comically at the other man before his eyes widened.

"You're right! But... you look _just_ like him! You even stand the same way! Are you... related?" His friends were murmuring the same sort of sentiment, looking at him with something between surprise and disgust. It was probably the worst of the scars on his forehead showing where his hair couldn't cover it.

Alarms started going off in the older man's head, and he felt a smile pull itself across his lips. Oh, this was too good to be true.

"I don't know of anyone in my family that looks so much like myself. They say everyone has a double or two in this world, though. Who is this Ryuga Hideki?"

"How do you not know who he is, what with him having the same name as that pop star and looking the way he does!" The boy chuckled, then seemed to realize what he'd said could have been insulting and looked away awkwardly. One of his friends piped up for him.

"Did you miss the entrance ceremony? He gave the freshman address along with Yagami Light. They both had perfect scores when they entered. That was amazing!"

"They are also both great at tennis. That's why we're trying to recruit them."

"Plus Yagami-san is _hot!_" whispered one of the girls to her friend, and they both tittered. The boys couldn't even hear their exchange, but the older man picked it up with ears honed to razor-sharpness from years of observation.

"They play tennis?" Another alarm.

"They could have each taken on the tennis captain and beaten him blind-folded. The two of them are incredible!"

"So Yagami and Ryuga are friends as well?" No sense wasting the opportunity to find information that might prove useful later.

"They hung out together sometimes, so probably. They've both been gone for months, though. No one has seen them around."

"That's why we came after you. We thought you were Ryuga-san returning to school, so we wanted to ask about tennis again."

"Well, I'm sorry I disappointed you, then. Perhaps I too will run into this doppelganger of mine." He stepped away with a brief wave. "Adios!"

Their chatter picked up again as the older man headed away, his eyes gleaming with anticipation. Oh, what a fortunate turn of events. He simply had to get to a computer as soon as possible and do some research.

* * *

_Two weeks ago..._

_-_

It was full dark by the time Light left the Kira Investigation HQ. Class had run late that day due to his teacher's bright idea to give a surprise test. It was no more difficult than anything else, but the essays had been time-consuming, and he was later than normal to see the investigation team at HQ. It was eating up all of his free time, but this cat-and-mouse game with Ryuzaki was sure to be a delightful challenge in the upcoming weeks, at least until he was able to find a way to get rid of Ryuzaki once and for all.

Pity, that. He wondered briefly if there would ever be another challenge like this man. Probably not. Light had never even met someone able to interest him in conversation, let alone someone he was able to call a "friend". It always made him slightly regretful to think of planning Ryuzaki's death, but it was a necessary sacrifice. If he started giving ground on his ideals now, he would never realize them.

Lost in thought, Light slung his backpack over one shoulder and headed down the street toward the train. He would barely make it before they stopped running, but there was no need to hurry if he knew he would get there in time.

There was a small sound off to his right, followed by something bouncing off his shoulder. Puzzled, he stopped moving long enough to see that a ball of newspaper had struck him. He peered into the darkness between two buildings squeezed close together, and maybe there was a flash of white, maybe there wasn't, but alarms starting going off in his head. It was dark, the streets were mostly empty, and someone lingering in the darkness was messing with him.

He turned quickly, intending to move away at a faster pace, but a scraping sound like shoes on pavement followed by the thud of someone hitting him from behind aborted his plan to escape. Arms wound around his and a wet cloth was pressed to his face. Whoever had gotten ahold of him was freakishly strong for what felt like a thin frame, but Light fought harder than he had ever fought with Ryuzaki to no avail. He tried to shout, but opening his mouth caused the cloth to be pushed into it, and the only sounds he made were muffled as the bitter liquid touched his tongue.

A weariness seemed to assail him, and he felt his movements growing slower. A new panic rose within him at the realization he was losing consciousness, but his body refused to respond, instead relaxing as though he was just going to sleep at home. He felt disconnected as his knees struck the pavement a hundred miles away, his head following soon after.

* * *

Light swam slowly up out of a dreamless sleep. He felt numb all over, but he got the feeling that he was actually awake now rather than still asleep. This wasn't his bed; it was too hard, and something in front of his eyelids was too bright to be his lamp. His whole head felt fuzzy, sleep-fogged, and he was having a hard time figuring out where he was and how he'd gotten here.

His eyes were like lead weights. Eventually, he gave up trying to open them and tried to move his fingers instead, wanting to reassure himself that he was, in fact, awake. He thought he could feel something moving, but the motion felt wrong, as though his limbs were made of cotton, or everything was swathed in layers of gauze.

New sensations and impressions slowly came to him, and he became aware of a strange smell. It was faintly metallic, coppery maybe, like the scent of loose change. There was another scent, though, faintly sweet in the same way that organic matter was cloying as it decomposed. Was he near a dumpster? He could vaguely recall something happening as he walked home from HQ...

That woke him up. He had been attacked. His eyes shot open, and the light above him punched needles into his eyes. Biting back a moan of pain, he turned his head to the side away from the light. Opening them more slowly, he looked to his left, a mounting trepidation growing inside him.

There was something next to his head. It was red and white and pink and purple and had shiny objects sticking out of it. He blinked slowly as the beginning of a headache crept up behind his eyes, trying to focus on what he was seeing that was so close to his head.

Realization was very slow to dawn as he studied it. Blood. Congealed blood, the source of the metallic smell, puddled beneath what might be a piece of meat less than a foot away from his face. Whitish bone showed through, and pink muscle tissue lay naked before him. The underside of reddened skin was stretched taut by metal T-pins, as though someone wanted the bones left exposed, perhaps to examine them. A sense of wrongness crawled through him at the sight, as though disgust was too far away to reach his drugged mind. Yes, he was drugged; that would explain the lack of surprise at seeing something so disgusting so close to him, as well as the deadness in his limbs and the lethargy.

There was something else, further beyond the grisly chunk of meat. His eyes trailed up the flesh-colored "tube", for lack of a better word, that led away from the meat to something wrapped in dark blue fabric that looked not unlike one of his dress shirts.

_Wait..._

Light felt something pulsing inside his head, like pressure building in a head of steam. His vision tunneled, shrinking to a pinhole that zeroed in on the fabric, which was bunched at a joint lying right next to him. He wanted to look away as a roaring grew in his head, some instinct for self-preservation trying to spare him the inevitable realization. His breathing grew strangled as the pressure grew, but a fear like he had never known drenched him in ice water and he gasped. His limbs finally started to respond to him, trembling fiercely as though he had palsy.

A litany to gods he couldn't name due to the fear overtaking his senses starting running through his head as his eyes traveled from the fabric, _his shirt, _slowly up his forearm to... to his... his eyes skittered away, driven away from the sight as though trying to save him from insanity, but something magnetic drew them back. The blood, the torn flesh, the naked, exposed bones...

It was his _hand!_

His jaw came unhinged, and he gaped like a fish as his mind struggled to process the sight. The hand had been neatly sliced open, every finger laid bare from fingertip to palm, the skin and muscles pulled back and held with T-pins, leaving blue and purple blood vessels both broken and whole lying in plain sight, as though it had been dissected. The cuts stopped at his wrist, and every crevice and shallow depression in the whole mess was outlined in sticky and slowly drying blood. The lack of pain was astonishing.

The pressure finally exploded, and the whole scene came sharply into focus. Light felt a wordless shriek trying to work its way out of his throat, clawing with dagger fingers at his insides as it fought to escape. The noise that finally ripped from him was primal, devoid of humanity, like he was an animal being slaughtered.

He had to look away from the sight of... of _that,_ or he was going to... to what? Go _crazy?!_

His breaths came short and sharp as he tried without success to look away. There was something around his right wrist, holding his arm down, but he couldn't fight it, not wanting to disturb his mutilated left hand. His legs were strapped down as well. All this he figured out without looking around, but when he tried to look elsewhere, his eyes focused on one thing. One person, rather, and the last thought he had was...

_L?! _

Oblivion mercifully took him away from the horror, drowning him in darkness before he could know any more.

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A/N - Don't expect the same level of polish from this one compared to my other one. I'm enjoying writing it in big chunks (Chapters 1-3 all went up in one day). If you like this at all, let me know, mainly because I'm curious who else likes torturing their characters this way. I have to say, though, this will be the most gruesome thing I have ever written, and it was making me sick to put in some of the details. Yay for broadening my horizons! Thanks for reading! 


	3. Morphine and the Madman

Chapter 3 – Morphine and the Madman

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This time, when light started to return, Light shied away from it, wanting nothing more than to sink into the depths of nothingness. There was no danger there, and no horror.

"Oh, no, you don't!" The odd words and a simultaneous slap across his cheek forced sleep away, and he lay again at reality's mercy. He kept his eyes closed so tightly that his head throbbed with dull pain. Everything still felt mostly numb, and he found himself praying that it was a nightmare, that his hand wasn't cut to ribbons and still attached to him.

"Open your eyes," the voice purred, and he found them opening against his will, pried open by someone else's fingers. His vision was blurry, but a few blinks brought the person into focus.

For a brief moment, he knew such hate for and fear of the detective that had been handcuffed to him for months that he thought his heart had stopped, so strong were the warring emotions. How could he _dare _to do such a thing just because he had no evidence?

Light clung to the hatred even as he realized this was not Ryuzaki, merely someone who looked eerily like him. Hatred would keep away the inevitable pain as he studied the other man. He had the same shaggy black hair, similar dark circles under his eyes, even the emaciated-looking build. There was something wrong, though. Something in his bloodshot eyes was clearly _mad, _and there was a pinkish scar almost hidden under the man's hair. Other than that, he could have been wearing a Ryuzaki disguise, like a Halloween costume.

"I look just like him, don't I?" Even the voice mimicked the deadpan tone of Ryuzaki's voice, though there was a faint accent to his Japanese. "You thought I was him, didn't you?"

Light remained speechless as shock began to set in. The man twirled something in his hand. It looked like a button with a clear tube leading from both sides. It went to his right side, and Light glanced over to see several tubes and bags of clear fluid on an IV pole.

"This is your morphine drip. There's a general anesthetic in there as well," the man said, and Light felt new fear as he realized just how much this man had planned this event. "I like to watch my victims wake up to what I've done to them. It's much more enjoyable without the pain to distract them." His smile was predatory, and also distinctly insane. "Now, I'd like to see your reaction with the pain." He reached over Light, who was still frozen with horror and shock, his mind refusing to come up with anything. His long fingers deftly plucked the IV from Light's elbow, and the brief sense of wrongness deep within his arm made him come back to his senses.

"It shouldn't take too long to wear off. Just think about how much more that will hurt when the drugs are gone." His voice kept trying to go up into a higher range now, as though he was singing while growing more excited. Light stared mutely, all of his eloquence, composure, pride gone out the window. He was at the mercy of a complete psychopath, someone who had done this before and had this torture down to an art. Something inside him was shattering, falling apart, and he felt tears sting his eyes.

He was Kira, he was fucking _Kira_, and there wasn't a thing he could do to stop this man. He had already taken one hand, who knew what else he would do? What could he say to stop this?

"Why?" The one word squeezed past his constricted vocal cords as though it had taken all of his effort to make that sound. The other man looked amused.

"Why? Because, Light Yagami, you are my bargaining chip. L will come for you if I ask." Light started to shake his head, wanting to say that the detective didn't actually give a damn about him and would never negotiate, but the man was not finished. "If not, you will at least amuse me before you finally die." He leaned back, smiling as though he had just told a joke as he looked at the ceiling. "Then I'll mail most of you back to him."

He rolled his eyes down to refocus on Light, who could feel the blood draining out of his face. "I like to keep souvenirs."

Light felt his heart constricting, and his breaths came short and fast. He felt giddy with the excessive oxygen even as fear got a new grip on him. To his horror, pain was starting to creep in as well, tickling at the edge of his awareness. What could he do? What could anyone do in this situation?

In times like these, thinking too much was going to kill him. He started imagining how much it was going to hurt when all the morphine was gone, and exactly _what _it was going to feel like, and he felt himself starting to shake. He could hear his teeth chatter every few seconds and tried to steel his jaw against it. It was not pride this time driving him; it was simple survival instinct. When cornered by the enemy, don't show fear, don't show that you're scared witless, put on a brave face and the enemy will lose heart.

Instead, Light's heart quailed at the half-lidded and smiling expression on the other man's face. Completely peaceful, he chose to delight in the savagery he was inflicting on him. This man was the very definition of insanity. Light fought to ask questions, to use the wit and intelligence that had saved him from certain death at L and the ICPO's hands in the past.

"Why... do you want L?" he had to pause to force more volume into his weak voice, which sounded like one belonging to a frightened girl. The man looked into his eyes, and it paralyzed Light, but not in the same way that Ryuzaki's gaze would have. Ryuzaki had intensity and charisma; this man had terror and intimidation.

"Why? Why does one crave sunlight after night has fallen? Why desire the sun in spring after the winter? Why wish for rain on a beautiful day?" His eyes rolled upwards, his irises unusually small in his now wide-open eyes. "Why question it? I want him. There is no other reason." Light should have known better than to try to get a straight answer out of a madman; none of it made any sense, but Light did get the impression that the man liked to talk.

A muscle in his left arm jerked as sensation started to return, and he let out a cry as pain danced along his nerve endings with fairy feet. It was fleeting, but it promised true misery when the anesthetic wore off. The nameless man grinned anew.

"You have a beautiful voice. I'll look forward to hearing more of it." Light clenched his teeth fiercely just before the man, his expression dreamy, poked sharply at what would have been the center of his palm with his finger. Fire, _agony, _shot through his arm, burning through the merciful numbness as the bones shifted, tugging the skin against the pins holding it in place.

He could not hold back the scream of fear this time, and his own vivid imagination slammed shut the doors of consciousness.

* * *

A/N - I like writing torture. Does that make me mad too? You can probably guess who Light's torturer is. I knew next to nothing about him when I started this fic, then I read _Another Note_, was blown completely away, and had to revise the story. I am so cosplaying as him at my next convention. 


	4. Paperthin Kira

A/N - I received several comments about the brevity of the chapters, which was partially because I didn't know at the time how it would be received. I will be posting longer ones, such as this one, unless I feel the need to break the material up with chapters, in which case there will be several in one night. My "chapters" aren't necessarily all the material I write at a given time. That being said, I love Light to bits, but it gives me such joy to abuse him so. Work is hateful and I have lots of ideas. 

If parts of the story appear vague, it is intentionally done for various reasons. Wow, what a vague statement.

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Paper-thin Kira

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L sighed and stirred another cube of sugar into his coffee. It was only early morning, and the rest of the investigation team had just gotten here at 8, but without Kira himself here, it wasn't as interesting. Of course, he could never call the boy "Kira" to his face, but ever since Higuchi had been killed, Light's entire attitude and behavior had reverted to what it had been before his imprisonment, the same suspicious behavior that had made L suspect him in the first place.

L doubted than anyone other than himself noticed the changes, but then again, he had been handcuffed to the boy for most of his "innocent" period, as he had taken to calling it. He knew the difference between the guileless Light driven by the pursuit of Kira, and the pretense of a guileless boy driven by justice whose eyes were just a bit too narrow, too observant. Innocent Light had been wide-eyed and open, and he smiled more genuinely. Kira Light's eyes were too sharp, but the rest of his expressions seemed genuine enough to anyone else.

L frowned. His thoughts did not need to be wandering regardless of his relationship with the Kira suspect. He focused the rest of his attention on the case files open before him. Different reports covered his entire desktop as well as the table before him, and he combed over them meticulously, again, trying to find that one bit of data that he had missed before to prove Kira's identity.

"Ryuzaki," Soichiro approached his left side, keeping his voice low so only L could hear. "I know you and Light were still hard at work when we left, but did he stay here last night too?"

L furrowed his brow as he looked at the older detective. "No, Yagami-san. He left here at 11:33 PM. He did not make it home?" That was strange. Light would have gone straight home; he had refocused on his coursework and refused to lose sleep anymore because of the investigation. L's mind immediately started going through possibilities.

Light would never have opted to stay with Misa; he had deduced Light's true feelings about the girl, despite what Kira's lying mouth now said. "Innocent" Light had even claimed it was a one-sided affection. Light may have missed the train and gotten a hotel room somewhere; as unlikely as that seemed, it was still possible. He may have gotten in an accident and been unable to notify anyone. There was also the slight possibility he had been mugged or otherwise detained.

"No, he never made it home, and he didn't call. You know how he is about that." Soichiro sighed. "His phone rings, but I don't get anything except his voicemail."

L frowned and pulled out his own phone. He didn't doubt the other man, but there was nothing quite like doing his own legwork. He speed-dialed the young man and held the phone beside his head with two fingers. It rang once, twice...

"Hello." It was only one word, and something cold crawled down L's spine. This was not Light's voice. He waited a moment, unwilling to speak to a stranger and leave his phone number there as well. The low voice continued, colored with a hint of mirth, "Is this... Ryuzaki?" L froze as the triply damned voice registered in his head. He was aware of Soichiro's sudden tensing in response to his own.

"No," he said. "But you would know that better than anyone." The voice chuckled. Of course B would notice his own name in Light's cell phone. He had known that eventually L would contact Light, and had been waiting for this moment, ignoring Soichiro's calls.

"Hello, _L_. It's been a long time."

"Where is Yagami-kun?" L was in no mood to humor this psychopath. Soichiro motioned behind him for all conversation to cease, and the low voices behind L fell silent.

"He's not available right now."

"What have you done to him?" Soichiro waited, but L could tell the other man wanted to grab the phone away; he had good police instincts in order to suppress his similarly strong paternal urges concerning his perfect son. L waited, the moments stretching out as he squelched his personal fears ruthlessly beneath years of conditioning.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" B's voice purred over the phone; it had always been disconcerting, even when B was young, but over the phone it was worse. "Why don't you come find out?"

"No." L's answer was immediate. "I can send a proxy, but I will not appear in person." He would never reveal himself to this man or meet anyone in public as L. Except for Light, of course; the prodigy had been the exception to a great many things.

"That's too bad. I'll call again to see if you change your mind. I'll play with him for a _few_ more days, at least." The line went dead. L closed the phone with restrained frustration and hit the intercom to notify Watari that they would need call-tracing equipment as soon as possible.

Soichiro's voice was low and dangerous when it finally rumbled from beside L. "Where is my son?"

"He is being held hostage." L debated how much information the man needed, unwilling to share potentially incriminating information about his past. He heard muttering behind him as the team started talking amongst themselves. "Someone I locked away in the past has apparently escaped and is now using your son to get me to reveal myself."

"I understand." Soichiro bit out, his face a mask of stone, but L wondered how much he did. "You can't show your face, and you can't compromise your own safety." He turned on his heel and left the room swiftly.

"Chief!" Matsuda called after him, but he was ignored. The younger man stood there, his arm still extended to catch Soichiro's arm, looking as lost as the rest of the team.

"Give Yagami-san some time. He will return when he is calm again." L sighed a little and sipped his coffee, his nonchalant movements a disguise for the organized chaos inside. His mind was racing, his blood was pounding through his veins, and he was furious. He didn't _want _to have to deal with B again. Locking him away once had been enough for a lifetime. He also didn't want Light hurt, but he knew B. Too well.

B had never left anyone alive, and his victims always bore the marks of extreme trauma, most of it inflicted before death. He repressed a shudder with difficulty; for something even so small to creep through his usual calm was a tribute to how much he was bothered by the thought. Light was someone he knew and ... well, the other people had been names and faces, that was all.

Light was special.

* * *

"Wake up, Light-kun," Ryuzaki's voice was right next to his ear. Light rolled over on his right side, unwilling to face the day so soon. Daylight wouldn't even come for a few more hours; it was likely only 5 AM. He supposed he should be grateful he got even 5 hours of sleep, but 6 or 7 might have been preferable.

"Get lost," he mumbled into his pillow. Ryuzaki moved closer to him and started fiddling with his hair, running his fingers through it and messing it up in that way that he knew Light hated, the links on the chain clinking together softly. "Knock it off," he said without particular forcefulness. In response, Ryuzaki's hand trailed along his arm, his fingers eventually tangling with Light's own. For some reason, the caress was strangely painful, as though Ryuzaki's hands were burning hot.

"What are you doing?" he murmured, shifting in order to look up into the other man's dark eyes as he tried to take his hand back. The pain intensified as he pulled back.

"I'm taking Kira's hands... so he can't write any more names." L's normally thoughtful expression warped into something out of nightmare, his features distorting with hatred and his eyes glowing white surrounded by deepest black. His mouth twisted into a snarl as he brought his other hand up to hold Light's captive, and the burning feeling increased.

"Ryuzaki, what-" the sharp pain cut him off as L squeezed. He fought to push the other away, but his limbs refused to respond. "What the hell-?!" He watched in horror, completely unable to move as L's fingers squeezed his to a pulp. The skin on his purpling fingers split like overripe fruit as he stared, feeling like it was happening to someone else as blood started sluicing down Ryuzaki's wrists.

"If you can't write, you can't kill." His voice was low and deadly.

"_Ryuzaki!" _he shrieked, for the man's impenetrable eyes remained fixed on his, even as Light's hand seemed to burst, the skin and muscles peeling away from his bones...

... and Light woke up.

The nightmare didn't end. His hand was still on fire, and he was too frightened to see what had happened to it. He smelled blood again, probably fresh. Everything from his elbow up on that side was painful beyond comprehension. It felt like lines of fire were etched atop his veins, and the closer they came to what had been his hand, the more it hurt. There were no words in his mind for the kind of agony he felt.

It was as though his hand was littered with paper cuts, innocuous scratches that stung far more than they should. Then someone had pulled the edges apart and rubbed salt into them so that it burned before proceeding to tear the sides of the cuts open, the flesh ripping and fraying messily like carpet fibers. He shook; envisioning that was too much for his overtaxed mind to handle. His legs were shaking uncontrollably, and his teeth chattered fiercely despite him clamping them tight against nausea.

He was going to be sick. His face was heating up rapidly, and his saliva tasted bitter, like acid. He curled in on himself, trying to will away the spasms in his stomach while not moving his left hand, but it was useless. A fist roughly grabbed his hair, pulling his head to the side just as he started retching.

It was a horrible position to be in, lying half on his side with both hands pinned down and a hand holding his head at a bad angle for him to vomit. Light could feel his legs kicking out against the straps as he thrashed, feeling as though his internal organs were trying to escape his body. His neck muscles were strained with effort, and sweat burst out across his forehead. His eyes streamed with tears. Long after he stopped vomiting, he continued to convulse, every muscle in his body clenched so tight that he thought he was going to shatter from sheer tension.

After the worst of the spasms had passed, he found himself sobbing at the horror of it all. The hand in his hair waited to see if he was going to throw up anymore before releasing him. Light dimly heard a bucket hit the floor as he tried to regain control of his legs, which were still shaking wildly. He felt hands at his right wrist, only dimly aware of his arm being released but too distracted by the gluey bitter feeling in his mouth and the sensation of hammering at the inside of his skull. He panted weakly, trying to calm his racing heart even as his hand lolled free of its binding.

"Sit up," a voice said, and Light complied mindlessly, the pain and humiliation too fresh in his mind to even allow him to question it. He wept without pride, the back of his hand pressed to his forehead to cover his eyes, as though he was a child. He felt more ashamed than he ever had in his life. The soft whine coming from his throat wasn't even recognizable to him; it sounded like a wounded puppy. He couldn't sit up all the way without disturbing his left hand, which had shifted and torn further open during his thrashing. The mind-numbing pain was still there, but it was slightly relegated to background noise as he tried to hang onto the cup that was placed in his hand. His eyes had still not opened since he had woken, and he intended to keep it that way; they were soaked with tears and hot with shame.

"Well, rinse your mouth out." He lifted the cup, numbly following orders, spitting when he was told into the bucket again. He rinsed his mouth a few more times and drank the rest of the water. His pride was in tatters, the usual effect of his combined appearance and charisma a shambles; he had nothing. He didn't even have his Death Note. He was weaponless in a fight with a _god_.

A hand in his chest pushed him back, and, unthinking, he lay back down, the hands buckling his wrist back into the restraint.

It was only hours later, after the damned tears had finally subsided and the fierce agony of his mutilated hand had become a constant in his existence that he realized he had not even fought his captor, instead obeying mindlessly and even allowing himself to be restrained again.

He had never known his mind could be so weak. Where had this supposedly ruthless Kira gone?

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A/N - Not as much "fun stuff" this chapter, but expect more soon. I have time off my hateful job and my mental state is better than ever before, even if I am sick as a dog in body. I apologize if my migraines show in the writing! Thank you always for reading, and review if you like! It feeds the Muses and makes me want to write more! 


	5. What Becomes of Defective Toys?

A/N - If you're coming here because you have a Story Alert or something, I highly recommend going back and reading the first chapters again, for Chapter 2 has a whole new scene. I added things after reading _Another Note_, and you're missing out if you don't go back. : ) To think, I wanted to use B as a stock villain, ha!

* * *

What Becomes of Defective Toys? 

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_**  
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B watched Light as he drifted in and out of fitful sleep. The boy was sleeping so much, but he had probably never been exposed to this sort of trauma before. B had slept a lot in the past due to his own self-inflicted injuries, but then again, B had known pain the likes of which most could not imagine, spending months slipping in and out of consciousness and suffering agonies that this pampered doll would have died from.

He did look wonderful, though. His face was still slightly flushed, giving his flawless complexion a healthy dose of color. His cheeks were wet with tears, and B relished the sight of them, restraining himself with difficulty from tasting them. Honey-colored hair spilled across the table like mead, its strands quite soft to the touch. This boy made quite a display piece.

His hand, however, was a work of art; B had never done something quite like that before, and it had turned out wonderfully. The flesh had peeled back like the skin of an orange under his scalpel, and he left the pins in for effect. The human hand was a marvel of engineering, and he wanted the structure of it left on display. Of course, he also wanted Light horrified beyond comprehension. People didn't like to see the insides of themselves, and their expressions were priceless to behold when they realized exactly what had been done to them while they were sleeping. Next time he would have to do some artful deconstruction with Light still conscious, preferably without the morphine as well.

He bit down on his thumb in a mimicry of one of L's poses, contemplating what to do next. This was only his second day with the boy, and he would probably spend a day or two more with him before giving L another call.

His plan had worked out beautifully thus far. Ever since those students at Tokyo University had unwittingly handed him exactly the information he needed after mistaking him for L, he had unearthed as much as he could about this "Ryuga Hideki" and "Yagami Light".

Ryuga Hideki was a pop star, not a college student, and there were no references online other than the ones existing for the celebrity. Even though there was a student registered with the same name at the university, the records in the school's database were curiously blank, and there were no pictures even in the university's newspaper. That was odd, given that there should have been at least a few if this person had aced the entrance exam, which was supposedly impossible, as well as given the freshman address. B had suspected back then and almost certainly knew now that this man was L using a fake name to protect himself from this Kira person, though why he had entered school and shown his face in public was still beyond B.

Yagami Light did exist, though, and he had found him by looking up the freshman representative since he couldn't figure out the spelling of his name. His records were completely normal, and there was a photograph of him to go with the profile, which confirmed his unusual name when he looked at it with his shinigami eyes.

The fact that both of these people had been missing for months was unusual. He could understand L ducking out of the public's eye as soon as he fulfilled his purpose in attending college, which was ludicrous since no one from Wammy's House needed to go to an ordinary school. However, why was this Yagami Light gone as well? Had L perhaps been going to school in order to meet up with this person? What would be his reasons for doing so? Did this all tie into the Kira investigation that had almost certainly brought L to this part of Japan, as he had pointed out in the broadcast?

Maybe this boy was part of the investigation, and L needed to be close to him. That didn't make a lot of sense, though, for Light was only 18; no one that young would be working for the police. He was either working closely with L for some other reason or...

B's face hardened, his lip drawing back in a snarl as he discarded his last thought. No, that was not a possibility. L cared for no one, neither friend nor lover, except for maybe Wammy. L was reportedly a machine, unmatched by anyone and so brilliant that Wammy had tried to duplicate his genius using unusually gifted orphans at his first orphanage in Winchester, the one now known as Wammy House. He had starting training orphans the same way L had been taught, as though L was a mere tool that could be replicated with the right materials.

B had entered Wammy House in 1994 after his mother's death when he was 12 and L was 15, just starting his detective career. B had become the second attempt to recreate L, and his teachers were quick to tell B that he was highly intelligent, brilliant even. He was still a prototype, though, and in comparison to L, the epitome of everything that they were striving to create, B was a shallow copy. He was not L. B had never even been allowed to meet him, and that, more than anything else, convinced him that they had never expected him to succeed. He was merely part of a trial run, a test subject that would find the flaws in their teaching techniques.

B was being used.

He underwent several years of training and testing, his reasoning and deductive abilities constantly being analyzed, the workings of his mind picked apart to see if he was on the same level as L. After years spent dwelling on it, B did not think now that they were trying to be cruel back then, but they had been so focused on their task that they had failed to see a lonely, friendless youth with too much intelligence in front of them. The four prototypes' studies had segregated them from the other orphans, and they were becoming shadows of themselves, two-dimensional children with only one driving thought in their minds: _become L_. None of them ever met the original, for Wammy wanted to see if he could re-create L without any influence from the man himself.

A, the first L prototype, killed himself when B was 16. He was practicing with the handguns at the range when he chose to aim his last round at the back of his throat rather than the targets. B had been there that day, and he had known this was the day that A would die without knowing how as the older boy's hands decisively put the barrel in his mouth. He felt no more surprise at his death than he had anyone else's, but candidates C and D were shaken by the suicide. They had been unable for years to even match B's level of development, so Wammy decided a few months later to disband the program in 1998. No more L's would be created, but 'heirs' would be trained instead to fill his place, in teams if necessary, when L either retired or died.

In the end, the only thing that B had been doing with his life was taken away from him. It was like having his legs kicked out from under him while on the edge of a precipice; his reason for being was gone, his goals made invalid, worthless. B's every waking moment had been a battle with someone he had never met in order to prove himself his equal, and now they were telling him he was a failure?

They offered to keep him at the school, likely to use him to develop a less debilitating curriculum for the other students, but B wanted no part of it and took the opportunity to flee. He was only 16, but with his genius, there was nothing he couldn't do. He had started, unconsciously at first, to emulate L in every way that he could, perhaps as a reminder of his past life. He had heard plenty of comments as to the older man's way of sitting, eating, dressing, speaking, as much as anyone could know without ever seeing his face. He had seen hand-drawn pictures that he asked for from the children that had not been in the prototype program. They had seen L. No one ever photographed him, which was a pity, for then B would have been able to see his real name and face. He changed himself to look like and act like L in every way, for after all, he had been trained to _be_ him. What better way to prove that he was equal to or better than the original by becoming him in every way?

He had spent a few years amassing funds, hiring himself out to sleuth, analyze profit margins, translate documents at home, anything that he could do without a lot of face-to-face contact. People often found his new mannerisms strange, so he stopped bothering with them in person as often. Then, he had started to develop his master plan, the one that would redeem him as B, no, as _L_.

It had taken months and months to plan the Los Angeles BB Murder Case in 2002, his last-ditch attempt to finally defeat L after spending years still thinking of his failure to surpass the man. Every part of it had gone perfectly, except for that damn Naomi Misora, for she had been smarter than he had given her credit for. She foiled his plan before he actually burned to death, leaving him to rot in jail with burns that everyone claimed would kill him before the year was out.

He had only been 20 years old.

The memories of that time were the worst ones of his life, worse than when he had been told he would never match L. It had been proven to him then that he couldn't beat L despite his best efforts. Coupled with the nightmarish recovery from scars that covered his entire body, his shame had an easy time consuming him, leaving him with little besides the desire to just kill himself and get it over with. He woke every day and wished that he had died in the night, especially when dealing with the horror of a morphine addiction that the doctors had encouraged in him, likely intending him to suffer further. This had gone on an indeterminate amount of time, time that he wasted in self-pity and misery.

Until recently, however. Something in him changed only about six months ago, and he woke, as if born again, with a new plan to correct everything. It was such a perfect idea that he couldn't stop thinking about it. Breaking out of prison was far from impossible for him; he was a genius after all, and one trained to think his way out of anything. Robberies and murders had gotten him the money he needed to finance the facial reconstruction as well as the skin grafts that started at his hands and were slowly working his way up the rest of him. The doctors he had paid to keep quiet had said it would take years to fix, but he didn't mind. If it took years, so be it, as long as he could walk around in public and not have people run screaming from him, he was fine. It helped his disguise if he didn't have something as noticeable as grotesque burns to make him stand out.

He was also sure the real L didn't have skin that looked like pink taffy that had been pulled away from his skull in handfuls and stuck back wherever it would go. The prison doctors had remarked that it was amazing he could still see and use all of his limbs given the potential for nerve damage. It made him perversely proud that he had done so much damage, almost all of it cosmetic.

His face looked mostly normal now, except for a particularly stubborn ridge that started on his forehead over his left eyebrow and ran over his temple into the hair over his ear. It was where he had dropped the match after drenching himself in gasoline, the first part of him to go up in flames. He had left it there after one graft had failed to conceal it, intending to keep it as a reminder. His hair almost always covered it anyway. His hands looked normal as well; it was around his elbows and below his collar that the abused skin still puckered abnormally and was shaped into ridges that twined around his limbs. He couldn't blame the doctors for not wanting to spend extra time to make a convict look pretty for his time in jail.

All of that had gotten him to where he was now, with a Japanese pretty boy for a prisoner and a plaything. He hadn't ever taken a hostage before, for he had never needed one. This time was different, though. His goals had changed.

Now he only wanted L. Not to surpass him or prove his equality; he had already failed in that in the worst way. Now he wanted to see him, really see L face to face and witness that which he had wasted so much of his life trying to be. It would give him closure and allow him to move on. Maybe. Or maybe it would just get him killed.

Going back to his earlier thoughts when a moan from Light broke his reverie, he mused upon the anomaly that was this boy. There were questions that needed answering, but he had plenty of time. L was all that mattered, after all. He would spend a few days satisfying his curiosities as to the workings of the human body before contacting L again. He was in control of the situation this time.

He unfolded himself and moved to stand by the Japanese boy's head. Finding it difficult to resist, he poked at the artfully mutilated hand, waking Light with a start as he gasped in pain. The flesh was starting to get infected; he could see yellow pus around several of the pins. He would have to clean it, for he didn't want a mere blood infection to detract from other far more painful methods of torture.

He shuddered with anticipation, leaving Light to get a bottle of salt water.

* * *

Light had thought life before the Death Note was boring. How stupid he had been. Better to be bored, well-fed, safe, and have both of his hands than bored, frightened, drenched in his own sweat, and at the mercy of a psychopath. He steeled himself for long minutes before opening salt-encrusted eyes, but he did not see his captor. The crazed man was nowhere to be seen. 

He bit down hard on his tongue to distract himself before looking at his hand. Several of the pins had fallen over, soaked with new blood from where he had jerked on them while vomiting earlier. New blood spilled out of his palm and stretched ever closer to his face. His stomach gave a lurch, and he looked away. Maybe it was better if he never looked again.

The pain came and went in waves in tune with his heartbeat. Every pulse of his blood made it flare anew, and the agony lessened ever so slightly as it receded, like ocean waves. He let his eyes go out of focus as he tried to level his breathing.

A door opened, and simultaneously he tensed up and his gaze darted to the door. The man was back, carrying a bottle of clear fluid in one hand. The lax smile he was wearing grew as he looked upon Light, who wondered anew at this man's resemblance to Ryuzaki. It wasn't familial, it was more like this man was trying to imitate him.

"Good morning, Light. It's time to clean your hand." Ice water pumped through his veins as he arched away, unable to speak for fear of what that entailed. The man feigned concern, but the effect was about as helpful as a wolf smiling to hide its teeth. "But you don't want it to rot and fall off, do you? Come now, don't be a child."

"I'm..." Light stammered, not even sure what he was going to say. The man unscrewed the top on the bottle he was carrying, and Light feared that it would contain alcohol or peroxide, which would make the agony he had thus far endured seem delightful in comparison. "No!" he cried out, mortified at his lack of control as the man pinned his forearm down with one hand and poured with the other.

A wordless moan or shriek worked its way between Light's clenched teeth as the liquid washed over his hand. The burning intensified tenfold, and he kicked out furiously in an effort not to scream like never before. What he assumed now was saline spilled across the table and into his hair, bringing the blood and infected pus with it. He tried not to be sick again as the tepid liquid crawled across his ears. He arched his neck off the table so it wouldn't soak into his shirt as well, torn between pain-riddled fear and disgust. More strange noises came unwillingly from him; he hadn't even known he was capable of making sounds like that.

Finally, the bottle was empty, and the man dropped it in a can beside the table; Light could hear the clang it made as it hit. He waited for the new pain to subside, but it was slow to pass. To distract himself, he turned his gaze to the man watching him.

"Who are you?" he hissed unintentionally, the words forced out through muscles clenched fiercely against the torment his hand was experiencing.

"I thought you'd never ask." The man chuckled as though they were discussing the weather. "I'm Ryuzaki." Confusion twisted Light's pained expression.

"I'm the real Ryuzaki; L uses my name now as a sort of joke, I presume. And yes, L is his real name." Light felt his face harden at that thought. This whole time, he had known half of the detective's name!

"What's the rest of it?" he choked out past the rage blinding him at both his treatment and strangely, the detective as well, even though he was hardly to blame for his predicament.

"Only he knows," Ryuzaki shrugged. "You can call me B, though. L and I grew up together, but I never got to meet him. He put me in jail after I killed some people in Los Angeles." Light had not been mistaken when he had thought B liked to talk. He couldn't think of the man as Ryuzaki; that name belonged to someone else in his mind.

"And now... you've escaped?" Light's usual eloquence had deserted him, but he applauded his ability to carry on a conversation at all. It was a very welcome diversion from his own thoughts and the misery attached to his arm.

"Yes. I'm a very resourceful and clever individual." From the matter-of-fact tone of his voice, Light guessed that this was something B had been told often. "After all, I found L here, in the Kanto region of Japan, where he claimed Kira was in that broadcast. I know L likes playing games with his life and is very competitive, so I knew he would be here."

B busied himself with cleaning up around Light, further confusing the boy as to exactly how he was being treated. First he took scissors or a knife to his hand and pulled it apart, and then he held Light's head while he was sick and then cleaned up his wounds? The man was crazy; that's all there was to it. As B mopped up the saline and blood that had spilled into Light's hair, the younger man tried to find something more to ask to keep the man talking and not thinking about cutting him up.

"How did you find him?" Light queried, looking back up at the ceiling, trying not to flinch and tear even more of his hand apart.

"I knew that he would be working with the NPA. This case is too big for him to handle alone, but he would not reveal himself to the agency as a whole. Therefore, he has his own facility. I looked up everything that had been rented out or constructed since the broadcast and cross-referenced the names as well as I could. After that, it was merely a matter of keeping an eye on several at once via cameras or my own surveillance, taking note of which buildings had precious few individuals going in and out of them.

"Until you showed up, dear Yagami Tsuki, or should I say, Light. Yes, I know your name, even without going through your wallet. I knew you were connected with L when you both disappeared from Tokyo University at the same time, and when I saw you leave one of the buildings, I knew where L was." B smiled at Light as he prepared a syringe taken from a box that had lain out of sight until now, squeezing a little fluid out of the end of it to ensure that there were no air bubbles. B's smiles were even more frightening than L's, since B mostly tilted his head while raising his eyebrows over half-lidded eyes, making the straight line of his mouth seem to turn up due to the curvature of his face. This pose let Light see that there was a definite scar running along B's forehead. B continued as he worked.

"L is a genius, like you and myself, but he is not perfect. And he can't hide from me." His voice had lost that hint of cheeriness as he said the last, focusing his concentration on the needle. He moved to Light's side, and Light couldn't keep himself from shying away automatically, his questions about the holes in B's story forgotten.

"You'll like this. It's morphine, highly dilute, of course. I can't go wasting all of my IV's so early on," B assured him, one of his long fingers probing Light's right inner elbow for a vein. Light looked away, the sight of the man's hands touching him making him vaguely ill.

"Why are you telling me all of this?" Light could guess the answer, but he wanted to hear it anyway.

"Because only one of us leaves here alive," B replied, rolling his finger back and forth over a vein. "If you die, you can't tell anyone. If I die, it is because L killed me, and that is a fitting enough death, to die by his hands." There was a note of wonder in B's voice now.

The sudden stab of the syringe into Light's vulnerable flesh made him jerk against the restraints, tearing the needle out of his arm and cutting himself in the process. B clucked his tongue.

"If you want the morphine, I'd suggest staying still this time." Light bit his bottom lip and stared hard at the ceiling, trying to keep the words born of frustration from being spoken. It didn't work.

"If you didn't _stab_ me with it, I wouldn't jump." _Fuck. _Where had that bravado come from? He braced himself for a blow or a knife to come out of nowhere, but when nothing came, he looked over at the other man. B looked bored, or mildly disappointed, and the look was disturbingly similar to L's.

"Don't forget who's in charge of this situation, Yagami Light." B's voice had dropped even lower than Ryuz—no, _L_'s voice. The needle went in smoothly, and B depressed the plunger, his half-lidded eyes unreadable despite the danger in his voice. "I'd like to remind you that morphine is highly addictive. You'll suffer even if I give it to you, eventually. I've been through this. You'll be begging me for it in a few weeks, if you're still alive, and your buzz will only last a few hours then."

There was nothing Light could say to that. He looked away, unwilling to let the man see how humiliated he was. He was very good at reducing all of Light's barriers and walls to nothing. After all, _Kira_ had no defense against something as simple and brutal as pain. Mere torture had toppled the god Kira from his throne and left Light, poor fragile _human_ Light, to fend off his killer.

Something akin to euphoria slithered through his veins, and he nearly sighed with the sudden pleasure. It was merely a lessening of the constant, mind-crushing pain, but it was enough to almost make him weep with joy. B withdrew the needle with a doctor's care, wiping away the blood with that same attention that had inexplicably disturbed Light earlier.

"Feeling better already?" Light nodded, hating himself for it. He was so weak, so damnably weak, that acknowledging that this man took away the pain made him feel like a whore. B's touch lingered on the sensitive skin of his inner arm, and Light could feel goosebumps forming.

"Now that I've answered your questions, perhaps you could answer some of mine."

"Why would... never mind." Light had been about to say that B would probably torture the answers out of him, but he didn't want to give him ideas. Light frowned at his near inability to control his tongue, but the drugs coursing through his system coupled with the pain made reasoning very difficult.

"Of course I will torture it out of you." B's answer to his unspoken question was immediate. "Were you with L because you are working with him?" He pulled a chair Light hadn't seen beside the table and sat backwards in it, resting his chin on his crossed arms atop the chair's back.

"Yes," Light answered, trying to figure out how much information in advance he could give him without damning himself or Kira.

"Why?"

"Because I asked him to." Light answered in a honest-sounding tone of voice, trying to reclaim his shattered dignity and with it, his composure and acting skills.

"And why would L honor the request of a mere 18-year-old?"

"I'm the highest scoring student in Japan." B raised an eyebrow and waited. Light stared back, hoping that he wouldn't have to say more, but B looked completely unconvinced. He settled for the truth, since there was no way B would come to remotely the same conclusions as L. "And he thinks I could be Kira. He wants to keep me close to watch me even if he does value my input on the case."

B laughed at that. "You, Kira? A mere child?" Light bristled at that, but didn't let it show on his face. This piece of crap had no right to mock him, but Light was in no position to be arrogant. "I trust L's reasoning ability completely, but that seems farfetched. Are you sure that is the truth?"

"It doesn't make sense to me either, but I was in the wrong place at the right time, and he thinks I have the intellect to be Kira."

"How delightful. And how close did he keep you? You didn't leave that building for at least the week I watched you in the beginning." Something in the obsidian chips of B's eyes shifted, like breaking glass. Light swallowed, suddenly nervous.

"What do you mean?"

"Did he have you under surveillance? Chain you to a wall? Keep you in a cell?"

"He had me chained to his wrist 24/7." B was perceptive, and Light was reluctant to lie given the state he was in. B's head tilted, his eyes filling with some emotion that Light didn't want to understand.

"I envy you, Yagami Light." The constant use of his whole name without honorifics struck him as odd every time B did it. B ran his thumb over the residual callouses left by the handcuffs on Light's left wrist, which was perilously close to the cuts he had made. "It was this hand, wasn't it? I wondered what could cause these marks." Something fluttered in Light's stomach at the contact, but it wasn't butterflies, more like bats; if he moved his hand even an inch, he would be touching all of that exposed flesh. He felt sick at the attention this man was paying to his hand. How much differently would he treat L, whom he was apparently obsessed with?

"Does that mean you slept together as well?" The sudden question threw him off balance, and his heart rate started to pick up as B continued to caress his wrist. No, B was asking if they slept in the same room, not in the same bed. There was no reason for him to suspect... Ugh, B's fingers were going to slip into Light's ravaged flesh if he kept kneading his wrist like that.

"Yes, we did share a room. He wouldn't let me off the chain unless it was to shower or change clothes."

"Did you share the bed as well?" There was no inflection to B's voice; it was sharp as steel.

"What are you implying?" Light cursed the defensive tone his voice had taken on. "No, there were two beds, just close to each other." He tried to calm his heart rate, but B's sudden squeeze on his wrist made his blood run cold. He was going to tear his hand even further open.

"Why is your heart racing, Light?" He fell silent, hoping that B wouldn't ask him anything more for a moment. His heart slowed back to its normal rhythm through sheer force of will, and Light regained his calm, able to look B in the eyes.

"Because you're frightening me, B." It shamed him to say that, but hopefully that would appeal to the man's need to assert his power over him. "You're hanging on to my injured hand. Can you blame me?" B's face stayed impassive.

"I suppose not. No matter. It will keep until the morning. Good night, Light. Sweet dreams." He stood up from the chair and picked a blanket up from the floor. Light quelled the ingrained response to thank him as he put it over Light's body. He would never _thank_ this bastard for anything. This piece of _shit _deserved to die the most agonizing death he could think of, preferably one that stretched his suffering out over weeks.

It must have been the lessening of the pain that made him so brave. Already the morphine was starting to get to him. It was a two-edged sword, for even if it made him feel infinitely better, it wasn't going to matter if he kept sassing B; he was going to get killed. He waited until B shut off the lights except for a red emergency light over the door as he left. Light heard a lock click on the other side and finally released a sigh of relief, feeling the tension shudder through him.

The red light over the door seemed to start moving in slow circles, and Light followed it with his eyes for a time. Strange, that. He must have been awake too long if he was seeing things like that. Wait, did morphine cause visual distortions too? He couldn't remember.

If B had continued to ask him about L, he would have surely deduced much more than Light was willing to divulge. He didn't have his usual barriers up, and his inability to hide everything behind his carefully controlled masks due to the constant pain made him transparent. The morphine coursing through his system with its cooling touch was going to make things even more difficult.

B was a jealous captor, greedy for every bit of L's attention, apparently. He didn't think B would take kindly to anyone else looking at L, much less touching him.

Light breathed in and out slowly, trying to calm back down. Pleasure was singing through his blood at the relief from the pain, but it was dangerous. If he relaxed, B was going to find out, and he was going to do far worse things to him than merely threaten him.

* * *

A/N - I just doubled this story's length with one chapter. All I can say is B rocks. Hard. He inspires me to write. And of course, I totally ignored the last line of the book, where it says that he dies. Otherwise I wouldn't have much of a story! I did put the scars in though, Expo!! 

I researched _Death Note 13: How to Read_ and cross-referenced with _Another Note _for the years. I made up B's age, but as far as I can tell, it's never mentioned.

All of my characters have theme music, and B's is definitely Aiden "The Last Sunrise (Dusk Mix)". Every time I listen to that, I imagine B 'working'. The rest of the "Underworld Evolution" soundtrack works fairly well for this story as well, minus the shrieky metal at the end. There is an amazing Death Note video on www animemusicvideos dot org for the Aiden song I mentioned. It's called "Avenge" and is definitely worth checking out.

* * *


	6. An Unintentional Truce?

An Unintentional Truce?

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The moment B opened the door, presumably the next morning, Light raised his head as much as he could. This was beyond humiliating, except for throwing up the other day, but if he didn't ask, he was going to be in trouble.

"B, I need to use the bathroom," he tried to keep the desperation out of his voice, but B merely shrugged. He sauntered over in a manner similar to L's, his back hunched and his walk languid, and started to unbuckle the restraints. He undid the one holding down Light's wrist before backing up and pulling out, of all things, a handgun. Light froze, still extremely uneasy around them due to the incident with his father after his imprisonment.

"You can undo the rest of the restraints yourself." B was far enough away that he couldn't reach him without jumping off the table, and he held the gun like he knew what to do with it.

Swallowing hard, Light turned and tried not to look too closely at his hand as he started to pull out the pins holding his skin down. The morphine's effects were still fairly strong, but it made him queasy to feel them there. There was a fluttering in his stomach as he continued to remove the blood-caked slivers of metal. In some places, the skin started to curl back up as the tension was released, and the sensation made his legs start to tremble. He could feel the blood draining out of his face as he worked, and a cold sweat ran down his neck.

Finally, they were all gone, and Light tried to move his arm. A sense of utter wrongness mingled with a kiss of dull pain which only worsened as he dragged his hand slowly down the table. Actually lifting his arm was impossible; it felt like his muscles were trying to pull his tenuously connected phalanges apart. He hissed from between clenched teeth as he stopped trying to move it and instead managed to undo the restraints around his ankles with one hand. His legs were lead weights as he swung them over the edge of the table, which was an inch or two too high for his feet to reach the ground, and tried to slide off. His legs were too weak from lack of proper circulation, though, and they gave out immediately upon reaching the ground. As he started to fall to his side, unthinkingly he threw out his arm to break his fall.

When his tortured hand touched the floor, stars went supernova in front of his vision, and oblivion slammed into him with the force of a runaway train.

He came to shortly thereafter, the throbbing pain barely cutting through the morphine and not allowing him to remain unconscious for long. B was dragging him by his collar and very nearly choking him, pulling him toward a door in the room other than the exit. Light's hand had been placed palm-side up in his lap, and the sight made him dizzy as the blood rushed out of his head with stunning speed. He had broken a bone or two; he could _see_ the shattered bone shards poking out of his mangled flesh, but he looked away before he could see how many. There was more blood smeared in a messy arc where he had fallen, and his shirt was soaking it up from his hand. His stomach pumped violently at the sight, and his mouth tasted bitter with saliva.

"I'm awake, B, I'm awake. I can walk," he grimaced as he said the words. He thought he could walk, for it had to be better than being dragged like this. B released him and backed off again, waiting as Light slowly stood up. It took an eon. He had to hold his left hand to his chest to keep from bumping it; he couldn't move the fingers at all except to open them slightly. After that, it was like a dance of incredibly complex proportions: put weight on one hand, fold up one leg, test it for stability, shift weight, fold up other leg, flex quadriceps, wobble dangerously, push off with hand and squat upwards... Light was sweating at the end of it, though he wondered how he had the fluids to do so, considering he hadn't drank anything in some time. It was probably the IV; B was incredibly thorough for a psychopath. Goodness knows where he was getting all of his supplies; maybe he was a doctor or a pharmacist.

"Take your time," B interrupted his musings, folding his arms across his chest, the gun still pointed at Light. "There is no hurry; all we're both waiting for is L."

"What do you mean?" B smiled that strange grin of his, tilting his head back so Light saw the scar again under his hair.

"L didn't want to meet me when I called, so I hung up on him to give him a few more days to ponder it."

"You... already spoke to him?" L had left him here with this madman? Light knew that L would be cautious, but since when would he allow an innocent, at least as far as he believed, be held hostage? "Does he know about...?" he looked lamely at his hand, feeling even sicker than he had when pulling the pins out of his own skin.

"I spoke to him after you and I talked. He responded immediately that he would not come. He doesn't know the specifics," B glanced down at Light's hand, "but he knows how I am. Some friend you have." His voice had dropped into a sibilant hiss on the last sentence, and Light felt his heart sinking. It was impossible that L didn't care enough to save him, but why wouldn't he...? His face hardened. L was _not_ his savior; he was as self-centered as Light himself, and this proved that only Light was going to get himself out of this. He didn't have time to ask any more as B pushed lightly against his shoulder, and Light obediently stepped backward, his pride having taken too many blows already to protest.

"There's a shower in there too." He closed the door in Light's face without waiting for a response and eyeballed him through the small window in the door just to show him that he could still watch him. Light shivered at the man's words before turning to finally use the facilities. How long had he been restrained? Two or three days? He honestly couldn't tell, what with fading in and out of consciousness so much.

When he went to turn on the shower, a sense of hopelessness washed over him. What was the point? So he could be clean before B gutted him like a fish and mailed his entrails to L? He had as much as said he was going to kill him by saying that things would happen _if he lived through this_. His mind couldn't grasp that. He couldn't possibly function if he believed that B was going to kill him no matter what. There had to be a way out, somehow, and he would find it. L was a genius as well; the man had to think of something.

He chuckled darkly as his thoughts returned to L without his consent. Did he subconsciously _want_ the detective to be his knight in shining armor? The same man who had chained him to himself and deprived him of sleep for months and accused him constantly of being a mass murderer when he was theoretically innocent? The same man who said he wanted true justice for Kira with one breath and professed that Light was his friend with the next?

He inadvertently derailed his own thoughts by bumping the shower door with his hand, eliciting a tiny cry from him that he bit off even though B probably couldn't hear him in here. The pain was starting to creep in behind the morphine, reaching shadowy fingers and tickling at his awareness. Light was afraid of the agony coming back. He shucked off his shirt as carefully as he could, pulling it meticulously over his hand one inch at a time. He couldn't fathom how he was going to get it back on. The rest of his clothes were shrugged off in a pile outside the shower, which had orange-scented shampoo and body wash in it. He was almost surprised that it wasn't strawberry, like L preferred. Maybe B hadn't gotten close enough to find out L's obsession with the fruit in all its forms, which was probably the case since he said he had never met him. Light had to give him a modicum of credit for doing such a good job copycatting him without ever meeting him.

Then he got into the hot water and all rational thought abandoned him. It felt so good that he wondered if he could just lie down and drown in it. The simple comfort almost brought tears to his eyes before he realized what an emotional wreck he was becoming, though he could hardly fault himself for the slip. He leaned against the wall, pressing his cheek against the cool tile, and held his left arm out of the spray, for he doubted that washing his exposed muscles and bones was a good idea. His eyes closed as the water coursed down his face, tracing the contours of his cheeks and drawing a path down his chest, eventually trailing down his legs and off his toes. The tension followed the same path, bleeding out of him and leaving him drained.

His own helplessness disgusted him. With the agony in his hand, he couldn't function or even think straight when it was throbbing through his arm. Pain of this magnitude was such a new sensation to him; obviously he had hurt himself in the past, but nothing compared to this sensation that his hand was still being ripped apart, a source of misery that didn't fade with time; it merely became background noise. It bothered him that he didn't even physically resist B, but he had always relied on his mind to get him out of trouble. Especially during the Kira case, his mind had kept him well away from suspicion and danger even though he had killed record numbers of people. His physical abilities had only been tested in tennis and in fights with the unusually resilient L; they were not up to disarming someone with a gun who seemed to be in very good health compared to him.

He shook off his thoughts before they could become self-pitying, shutting off the water and stepping out of the warmth. After drying off, he got mostly dressed without too much trouble, but he didn't relish the thought of putting a blood-soaked shirt back on. He took what had been one of his favorite shirts to the sink and started to wash it. Everything took so long to do with only one hand, but he couldn't even get his left hand wet without seeing stars. He settled for eventually putting his damp shirt back on with only his right arm in it. Try as he might, the nausea that slammed through him as he tried to put the other hand back through the sleeve made it impossible to put back on.

He felt much better despite his uncomfortable dress as he opened the door again. B was sitting atop the table that had the restraints in L's crouch, the barrel of the gun still pointed toward Light even as it lay on the table with B's hand loosely atop it. B nodded toward something on a smaller table where he had gotten the syringes earlier.

"It's not much, but it's food. I don't have the supplies to feed you intravenously as well." Light glanced at the offerings and saw that, thankfully, there were no cakes or pies. There was packaged sushi and a seaweed salad with the labels ripped off; evidently B didn't want him to know where he had gotten them from. There were two bottles of water as well, and Light picked up one of them first. B didn't move from his place, so Light sat in the chair that B had used earlier, noting that it was still far enough away from B that the other could shoot him before Light reached him if he stupidly decided to attack him.

It felt good to sit up; it only increased his feelings of helplessness when he couldn't even look his captor in the eye. He held the water between his knees and twisted the top off, eagerly finishing off the entire bottle when he got it open. His mouth was cottony-dry whenever he wasn't sick, and it bothered him.

"Why are you doing this?" he asked as he lifted the top off the mixed sushi. "I can see keeping me alive until you get L, but you don't have to let me out of the restraints too."

"Are you complaining?" Light felt like a child as he shook his head, feeling his damp bangs brushing across his forehead. "I've never taken a hostage before, so I can't say as I have an established procedure for hostage negotiations. It's not the most interesting thing in the world, so I decided to try to make you relatively comfortable while we wait. I have no ill will toward you personally, so I feel no need to make you suffer."

That made Light pause as he picked up a piece of tuna sushi with the hand left intact. No ill will, when he'd carved into his hand like a piece of meat and left it exposed to the open air?

B snickered as he followed Light's gaze.

"That was not punishment. I was bored, that was all." Light glanced at him, disgusted by the smile on B's face. Despite his rage at the man for causing him this kind of suffering, however, he thought he could understand. After all, he had started killing and judging humanity out of boredom even though his goals were much more noble.

"You have a strange way of dealing with boredom." Light couldn't shake the feeling that this was the pot calling the kettle black.

"Perhaps, but can you say that I have forced you to suffer unduly? You've got morphine and I have plenty more where that came from. My goal is to keep you alive, not kill you inadvertently."

It struck Light then that B was almost completely different than the sadist he had first spoken to. At first, B had talked to him as though he was going to mutilate and send pieces of him back to L within days; he had even_ said_ as much. Who was this only slightly deranged benefactor that he now spoke with? Was this what speaking to someone indubitably insane was like, this total incongruity between their words and their actions from one day to the next?

"What do you plan to do with L?" Light found himself trying to keep the conversation going despite his misgivings. It kept him from thinking too much about his current predicament. He wasn't thinking overmuch about plans to kill B or escape him just yet; he needed to know more.

"That is the million dollar question, isn't it?" B chuckled softly, the sound little more than air escaping his mouth. "I'm not sure myself. Perhaps I just need to see him, get some sort of closure."

"Did L do something to you?" Light was surprised that B was telling him more than he had earlier. He had gotten the impression that B was simply obsessed with the man, maybe physically, maybe intellectually, but certainly an unreasoning sort of devotion. Now perhaps there was a deeper meaning that B had been unwilling to divulge earlier.

B looked at him, his face angling down until he looked even more like L as he glanced up at him though his hair. His eyes were weighing his response to Light's question, which was another way that he and L were different. L could be unreadable if he wanted, as inscrutable as a blank wall and completely indecipherable even to someone with Light's social skills. B was far more open in comparison.

"L did nothing to me personally, you could say, but he has never acknowledged my skills as an investigator... or a criminal." B shifted, resting more weight on one leg as he put one knee on the table, his hand still idly resting on the gun. "I was in training to be like him, but I was dismissed before reaching his level. The killings in Los Angeles were my attempt to outdo him, to give him a case he couldn't solve." Light waited before asking the inevitable question.

"It didn't work?" B only gave a slightly sheepish twist to his lips.

"I've gotten over the humiliation, but yes, you are correct. I set myself on fire to make myself the last in the chain of murder victims, forever leaving him in the dark as to my whereabouts, but I was discovered." He scowled slightly. "An FBI agent found me and saved me from burning to death, leaving me with these and my own shame." He pulled up one sleeve of his white shirt to reveal skin red and pink with savage burn scars that started about mid-forearm.

"The FBI agent was working as L's eyes and ears, one Naomi Misora. I think I underestimated her." Light stiffened at that, despite his best efforts. B's sharp eyes caught it and looked at him questioningly. "Is that name familiar to you?"

"Yes, actually. I saw her at the NPA volunteering to help with the Kira investigation when I went to see my father. I think her fiance was one of the agents killed by Kira."

"So she is here as well, in Japan?" B's eyes took on a feral glint.

"I don't know," Light lied smoothly, despite the smallest inkling to tell him some of the truth, that he 'suspected' she had been killed by Kira. "I only saw her that one time. Maybe L wasn't interested in using her again."

"Perhaps," B tapped a finger on the gun, making Light nervous since it was still pointed at him. "I would have liked to see her again, I think. Clever woman even if she couldn't stand sugar."

"Did you cultivate L's sugar addiction as well?" Light tried to direct the conversation away from Misora, reluctant to be pressed to answer more questions about his knowledge of her. As easily as lying came to him, he was uneasy about testing his skills with so many factors working against him. He figured this question was safe since it was obvious that B was imitating L even without explaining his reasons.

"Easily enough. It does help my energy levels after a few days without enough sleep, and then you have to keep eating it to keep from crashing. Either that or subsist on coffee, which leaves a dirty taste in my mouth after a while."

"Hmm," Light hummed as he finished off the sushi and started on the salad without any utensils. He wasn't concerned about quite a few things that might have bothered him in the past, quite content to eat with his hands if it got him food.

"Is the food all right?" B asked, as though he was a waiter inquiring as to Light's enjoyment of the meal. This complete turnaround from B's earlier treatment unnerved him, but he doubted he could inquire about it even indirectly without making B suspicious. It was better to just accept it for now and hope that B wouldn't fly off the handle in a sudden rage and cut him up some more.

"It's fine," Light replied as he daintily licked a bit of vinegar from his finger, which was the truth. Often enough, he had eaten the same thing at Headquarters when chained to L and unable to leave for lunch. He had been forced to ask for certain items and hope the rest of the team remembered what to get him during lunch if he didn't feel like cooking in the kitchen. Sometimes L, the pompous _ass_, took the decision out of his hands after the team left when he would refuse to stop working long enough to let him go to the kitchen at all. On those days, Light was condescendingly offered sweets to pacify him, which he invariably refused unless it was some sort of fruit, while he devised ways to make the detective pay later in explicit detail. He would also make every attempt to finish off the coffee pot when Watari was not there to make more for L, who seemed to hate doing anything for himself.

Sometimes it amazed Light how it was even possible to feel two such extremes for one person, especially since their 'friendship' was marked by vicious fights with physical repercussions that lasted for days rather than heartfelt conversation. Some said that best friends always fought, but no one would ever call a relationship characterized by distrust and suspicion that of 'best friends'.

His left arm jerked as a muscle spasmed in it, and he almost dropped his food when the spike of pain went through him. He gritted his teeth and held on to the salad, reluctant to let anything resembling nutrition fall to the floor because he was clumsy. The morphine must be starting to wear off as a dull ache seemed to lend his arm unusual weight.

"Does it hurt?" Light winced, wondering why he was asking. Wasn't it obvious? Hadn't he done this in the first place? Was he an utter _moron_? No, he was crazy, that was all. He was insane and unpredictable because of it.

"It's starting to," he finally replied as his thoughts ran in familiar circles. B stepped backwards off the table, uncannily graceful despite his contorted posture. He crossed the room to the door and turned back to Light to tell him that he would be right back, locking the door after he left.

Light was left alone to finish his meal, feeling more puzzled than ever. If he didn't know better, he'd say that this B and the one he had initially woken up to were two completely different people. Maybe B had dissociative personality disorder. After everything else, it really wouldn't surprise him.

The door clicked open, and he glanced up to see the gun, again, as well as a syringe in B's hand. Apparently, he had taken them out of the room while Light had been in the bathroom, perhaps so Light didn't try to use them on his own. Maybe B was going to let him remain unrestrained in the future. Light squelched that thought; better not to hope so he wasn't disappointed later.

"Can I trust you not to do anything incredibly stupid?" That got Light to look up. His _tormentor_ was asking if he could trust him? B continued without waiting for an answer. "You have two options when I approach you: you can sit still and hold out your right arm so I can give you your next dose, or you can get shot if you move. This is loaded and I can squeeze the trigger long before you can take it from me." Light couldn't stop the frustrated little laugh that bubbled up out of him. Hopeless. This situation was hopeless.

He set down his now empty lunch container and propped his arm on the back of the chair so it was fully extended and pointed toward B. He turned his head away for good measure. Of course he wanted the morphine, and he probably wouldn't have fought him anyway. He knew better than to tangle with an armed man one-handed, but having B tell him what to do like that bit savagely into his already wounded pride, like a lion chewing on its prey without killing it just to make it suffer.

He felt the needle slide expertly into his arm and tried to relax so B wouldn't think he was getting ready to jump him despite his warning. The cool feeling snaked through him again, wiping away the memory of the pain in his tortured limb. It felt so good already, even though he knew it hadn't been long enough to actually deaden the pain. His mind was telling him that everything would be alright now, and that worried him.

"Feeling it already?" Light nodded, his eyes closing of their own accord as he breathed out slowly. B withdrew the needle before backing away to what sounded like his usual distance. "It always hits hard at first. You'll get used to it."

"Will I?" Light asked, not liking the 'lost child' sound that he could hear in his voice. It made him think that he was growing a little too comfortable with this arrangement already, asking B for answers and maybe even reassurance.

This fiend had hurt him, badly. He was not Light's friend, despite their rather civil conversation today; he was a madman who had kidnapped and tortured him in order to get to someone else. He was completely despicable.

He had to remember that, even as his eyes started to close as he nodded off.

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A/N - Sorry for the long break between chapters. I think I was a little overzealous in my updating at first. I can't keep up that pace this month with school, but I now have a laptop with Wi-Fi (my old one was EIGHT years old!) so I won't be going without the whole month, and neither will you! Yay! It feels so good to be writing again!

Hope you enjoyed, and thanks always for reading!

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